Pour Decisions is back, and this month we've really gone and done it.
Three DJs. One bar. Zero responsible decisions.
Doug Shipton — host, curator, and the man responsible for Pour Decisions in all its forms — returns to Tate Corner Bar, and this time he's brought reinforcements. Jonny Trunk and Alan Gubby join him for an evening of records, drinks, and whatever tangents three of the most knowledgeable and opinionated people in British music feel like going down.
You already know what Doug does. If you don't, where have you been? Jonny Trunk has spent decades unearthing the weird, the wonderful, and the genuinely baffling from the margins of British culture. Alan Gubby has been soundtracking ritual and ruin with records that feel like they were pressed in another dimension. Together, the three of them form a lineup that has absolutely no business being in the same room together, let alone the same DJ booth.
Expect library music, lost exotica, folk that got a bit too weird, soundtracks to films that probably shouldn't have been made, and the occasional absolute banger that lands from nowhere and ruins you completely. Expect conversation, argument, and the specific joy of being around people who genuinely, irredeemably care about this stuff.
Tate Corner Bar will be open. The drinks will be cold. Your bank account and your sleep schedule are on their own.
Pour Decisions. May 28th. Tate Corner Bar. You've been warned.
JONNY TRUNK
Broadcaster, journalist, publisher, author, recording artist, DJ and proprietor of Trunk Records, Jonny Trunk has been hero to the unsung and recanonising mislaid cultural icons for so long he has since become one himself. Through his very idiosyncratic prism he has drawn together token doses of music, film, literature and graphic design to create a movement that goes far beyond any trite concept of kitsch. The man behind the first-ever releases of cult classic soundtracks for The Wicker Man, Kes, The Clangers, Dawn Of The Dead and The Tomorrow People, he is also responsible for reviving interest in the likes of Basil Kirchin, Delia Derbyshire and Michael Garrick, as well has being one of the earliest champions of the weird and wonderful world of library music. At a time when library records were the preserve of enlightened beat diggers, tele addicts and film buffs, Jonny was one of the very first to bring the world of production music to a wider public audience - with the first releases on the label mining the Bosworth library archives and then with the publication of the first of two books on the subject, The Music Library. A purveyor of the charmingly obscure, sometimes ludicrous but always wondrous, Jonny’s DJ sets are as promiscuous and thoroughly entertaining as the indispensable body of work he has produced over the past 30 years. As if Jonny’s resume wasn’t impressive enough, he is also the brains behind the annual Groovy Record Fayre, an essential London record fair held at the wonderfully archaic Mildmay Club.
ALAN GUBBY
A man seldom found behind a DJ booth these days - making this genuinely rare appearance all the more special - Alan Gubby’s resolute devotion to British electronica and Radiophonic experimentalism has rendered him in almost permanent self-imposed exile, in his perennial pursuit of cutting room floor castoffs and long-lost transmissions. As a producer and a musician Alan cranked out an impressive mid-90s/early-00s discography of everything from dubby acid jazz infused leftfield breaks to atmospheric big beat and trip-hop, under a slew of pseudonyms, through labels such as Leaf and Tru Thoughts as well as his own Nanny Tango and Kabal Agogo imprints. Informed by a fascination with early electronic music spoon fed to him through his favourite TV shows and films, in 2008 he would unearth BBC Radiophonic legend John Baker’s private tape archive and embark on a path that would mark the beginning of a long and fruitful working relationship with Jonny Trunk and lead to the foundation his own Buried Treasure Records. Providing both an outlet for his own personal recorded projects as well has beloved archival film scores and library records, his dedicated output over the past twenty years has come to represent a divining rod of sorts for his long-conceived multi-media paranoia concept project The Delaware Road - encompassing an illustrated novel, a compilation album, as well as two intimate audio/visual festivals held in suitably poignantly paranoid venues - the first at the Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker in Essex, the second at a Ministry Of Defence training compound on Salisbury Plain.
DOUG SHIPTON
The product of a youth misspent fine tuning teak panelled televisions and utilising the latest in top loading VHS technology – complete with wired remote – in order to watch umpteenth generation dubs of Video Nasty’s and obscure foreign language art house films, square-eyed resident DJ and Pour Decisions programmer Doug Shipton represents the third instalment in our soundtrack special triple-bill. As co-founder of Finders Keepers Records, he has not only had a hand in recontextualising global pop history but also in liberating lost and previously unheard motion picture soundtracks from scenes as far as wide as Czech New Wave, Bollywood horror, and cult Italian giallo classics. His label also responsible for the first-ever pressings of the likes of Alejandro Joderowksy’s acclaimed psychedelic masterpiece The Holy Mountain, Andrzej Żuławski’s visceral psychological horror Possession, as well as the scores for cult TV classics The Moomins and One Summer. Culturally nurtured in an age before on-demand streaming services and online record directories - much like all screen junkies of a certain age searching for that black wax fix with limited means at their disposal - Doug’s pursuit of cinematic sounds is a wistful tale of J. R. Hartley ring arounds, optimistic back page want ads and bewildered record shop owners. However, all that hard work has since paid off as you can now count on the fact that Doug’s globetrotting DJ sets are always spliced with some of the heaviest and exotic soundtracks ever committed to wax via celluloid.